In the previous three posts, we managed to double the speed of file loading time of CLRProfiler through profile-guided optimization in three simple steps. Now let's take a look at reducing CLRProfiler's memory consumption, making it more useful to real...

Playing with Visual Studio 2010 profiler data Function Code View finds another easy target for improvement: 19.7% in calling TryGetValue on a Dictionary object: This piece of code is called in 'c' command process for logged method call information...

Much has been written about the benefits of using StringBuilder over string concatenation. So much so that there seems to be overuse of StringBuilder class, causing performance issues again. If you're using StringBuilder and string concatenation a...

The benefit of having your own office, or at least one of them, is that you can have your own $29 IKEA armchar:

PDC 2005 is just a few days away! Now we can finally talk about digital document/printing under Windows Presentation Foundation(originally known as Avalon) using real code. I will be at the following sessions: Track Lounges: Presentation Hands...

I ordered my offical Microsoft blue shirts for PDC two weeks ago. But three working days away from PDC, they are nowhere to be seen. Our admin has been on medical leave for two weeks, so I thought they may be delivered to her office and locked up there...

Last week, close to 20,000 Microsoft employees gathered together at Safeco field to celebrate Microsoft's 30 year anniversary. It was a very cheerful event. This prompted me to search trough my collection of books and magazines to find out what was the...

Here are the sessions and other activities connected with the Microsoft Digital Document team at PDC 2005: Breakout Sessions DAT304 Unleashing the Power of XPS-Based File Formats for your Application Day/Time: Tuesday, September 13 2:45 PM- 4...

In the two previous postings, we discussed about two different ways of generating XPS (XML Paper Specification) Documents, one being printing to XPS Document Writer from Win32 applications, and the other being using the new WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation...

I learned something new about GDI font installation and printing recently. So if you're use functions like AddFontResourceEx or AddFontMemResourceEx to install fonts in your application and your application supports printing, you may want to continue...

It's not uncommon to have a print-out from your printer not matching what do you see on screen. Printing is a quite complicated process with multiple players involved. So it's not an easy job to figure out who is at fault, either to find a workaround...

Once a simple document format like XPS is created, it takes on a life of its own. Seeing the beauty of XPS, people are converting documents from differenent sources to XPS. People are trying to create XPS document with 10,000 pages, and even pushing for...

With a high school junior in the house, we're receiving tons of 'junk' mails from colleges these days. They usually pile up on the desk until we have time to read and discard them. Today, my wife found something useful, or rather something we have...

On April 19th, Bill Gates has been awarded a honorary Ph.D degree by Tsinghua University ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_University) , the best engineering school in China.

Today (May 15, 2007) is the first day of Winhec 2007. If you're application developers, printer/scanner/multi-functional device vendors, you may be interested in the following XPS related sessions. CLN-T370 XPSDrv: Best Practice using Print Verifier...

There will be two XPS related sessions at Winhec 2007 tomorrow, focusing on Performance Optimization for XPS Document. The techincal presentation (CLN-T371 ) will be at 8:30am to 9:30am in Room 502AB. Shortly after that (9:45 to 10:45), there will...

In the last post, we discussed the cost of using STL vector to module size. Now let’s take a look at how STL vector manages its data. Dia2Dump (Source code available in Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Dia SDK\Samples\Dia2Dump directory) shows the following...

Just before the new year, I noticed a copy of my book was listed on amazon.com for $160 (the listing price of the book is $60). A few days ago when I checked again, it was gone. Some poor guy or poor company paid more than double the original price of...

XPS is hot, so naturally more and more applications will be generating XPS. If your application has access to the XPS Document Writer, then the easiest way to generate XPS is just print to it. But there are cases you may want to generate XPS on your own...

Sunnyvale, Calif. - January 17, 2005 - Zoran Corporation (Nasdaq: ZRAN) announced that its IPS/XPS interpreter for Microsoft’s new XPS Document format will be available to printer and multifunction peripheral (MFP) manufacturers through an Early Adopter...

In the first step of profile-guided optimization, we reduced tatal CPU sample of ReadNewLog.ReadFile from 6,223 samples to 5,803 samples; the second step reduced it further to 3,982. Would it be nice if we can reduce it to below 3,111 samples, essentially...

I found myself increasingly generating reports in .csv format, and then use Excel to analyze the reports. With large amount of data written to the .csv file, file generation time becomes more and more noticable. So I took some time to check what is taking...

Six years ago I wrote a program to search for palindromic square numbers and other palindromic numbers and found some new palindromic numbers. But with increasing length, the search became longer and longer so I finally gave it up. Recently I got a...

Continuing searching palindromic sqaure numbers finds a new record number, a 55 digit parlindromic square: 1373512530649258635292477609 ^ 2 = 1886536671850530641991373196913731991460350581766356881 Quite a few records for other palindromic sequences...

WIth Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is releasing a new set of API for native parallel programming named ConRT (concurrent runtime). The purpose of this blog article is to illustrate the basics of ConcRT programming in VS 2010. We will be using...